


my fearful trip is done

by valkyrisms



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Brainwashing, Ensemble Cast, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-13 11:35:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18468130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valkyrisms/pseuds/valkyrisms
Summary: Cull Obsidian, the strongest of the Black Order, is sent to Earth with the scepter to take the Tesseract and lead the Chitauri invasion.Years later, as the Outrider army lands in Wakanda and with Thanos coming for the Mind and Space Stones, Steve finds a peculiar member of the Black Order guarding the jungle.





	my fearful trip is done

**Author's Note:**

> title is unoriginally paraphrased from, " oh captain! my captain!" by walt whitman.

_We don’t trade lives._

The sentiment was feeling farther and farther from the truth with each dead Wakandan soldier Steve had to step over on his way to the jungle.

A group of the Jabari had spotted Corvus Glaive with a pack of Outriders swooping into the jungle, presumably after Bruce, and Steve had been on the move until coming to the edge of the trees where the first wave of Outriders had hit on this side. He knew they were soldiers, the Dora Milaje even more than that, but seeing their bodies so still and in some cases, in pieces, still made his hands shaky. This was all for Vision, to keep him alive while retrieving the Mind Stone out of him as another weapon to use against Thanos, still coming from space; it was all for a good cause, but _still._

He had dinner with these people last night. He picked up one of the Jabari wooden spears, the ones he had seen go toe to toe with vibranium, that lay on the field and slung it over his back. His shields were strapped to his wrists were not made to kill, but he didn’t think Glaive would be showing him any mercy.

There was crashing coming from the jungle and Steve shook off the morbid depression weighing him down, picking up the pace. The last he had seen of Bruce was in the Hulkbuster armor, rolling with one of the massive Outriders into the trees, but he had no idea where he had gone from there. Steve didn’t think the man was _dead,_ certainly not from an Outrider;he and the Hulk might be involved in some kind of marriage spat, but he had no doubt he would come out if Bruce was seconds from death. But he didn’t want to see Glaive go against the Hulk either.

Cull Obsidian, back when the Infinity Stones had entered his worldview, had gone against the Hulk. It hadn’t been pretty, even if the Hulk had killed him in the end (Bruce had felt pretty bad about that, but Obsidian had died laughing in the thrill of battle, so Steve privately didn’t think it was so bad). Glaive wasn’t big like Obsidian was, but he was faster. It wasn’t a match-up he felt comfortable about, especially if Glaive managed to batter Bruce around first. He might _survive,_ but Steve didn’t want every bone in his body broken before the Hulk decided to show.

The crashing was getting farther away. Steve kept going further in, towards the noises, trying to keep an eye on all surroundings, checking his back, checking in with his team, checking in with Shuri, checking for Outriders in the bushes, and it felt like a war on all sides all over again, like the Chitauri. It felt like paranoia. The jungle was dense and claustrophobic, playing tricks on his ears and eyes whenever a beetle scuttled across his path or he heard a bird, which is why he almost missed it.

Something was moving against the trees.

It looked— wrong. There was no one there, but the air had been distorted, just for a second, just long enough for Steve to notice. He brought his shields up. The air moved again, like Tony in his reflective armor (god, _Tony,_ Steve would’ve listened to a thousand of his terrible jokes to have Iron Man cutting through the skies right now), like camouflage. If Steve hadn’t spent the past half a decade looking at the reflective Helicarrier and Tony’s later suits, he wouldn’t have noticed it at all, it was so subtle.

Steve crept forward, shields still held in front of his body, eyes peering over the rims to whatever shape was slinking unseen between the trees. It was humanoid, that was for sure, body-shaped and the appropriate height for a person. Was it some kind of Wakandan tech, something he hadn’t seen yet? Was this T’Challa in a new suit? Was it a new breed of Outrider? Steve lowered one of his shields and reached for the Jabari spear. It felt absurd to stop for one enemy among the hundreds outside the jungle, but the idea of someone stalking him through the jungle as he tried to get to Bruce wasn’t reassuring either.

“Who’s there?” he called out, hefting the spear with one hand. The shimmering thing moved, almost perked up, and moved a little closer. Not in an attack movement. “T’Challa, is that you?” The spear lowered an inch and Steve crept forward. For one second, hope flared that it _was_ Tony, here with his suit to help save the world and not actually dead with Spider-Man in space, and his concentration slipped, just for one second.

Something snapped around his ankle. There was a second where all Steve recognized was pressure before the pain kicked in, a horrible burning, and the spear fell to the ground as he fell flat on his ass. Some kind of trap—tripwire? — golden, shining rope coiled around his right ankle, burning right through his boots and armor and onto his skin—

The shimmering thing hadn’t stopped advancing, had gotten _closer_ and _faster_ now that Steve was caught in its trap— why didn’t it occur to Steve that it was a trap? — and finally lunging for him. The golden rope wasn’t long where it was emerging from the ground, but it wasn’t extremely short either, and Steve managed to roll out of the way and to the side to avoid the attack. It was hard enough keeping track of the thing when he could barely see it, harder still now it was moving so damn fast, so while Steve tried to get back to his feet something wrapped around the side of his neck, pulling him back down to the ground. Not another rope, but something cold and solid, and when he felt the same thing happen on the other side of his neck, he realized he was being choked in a replica of one of Natasha’s moves: the icy blocks around his neck were legs.

Steve was studier than the average human, but whatever was choking him _wasn’t_ human, harder and freezing even though he could parse out the feeling of clothing against his neck and jaws. There was half a minute of super soldier stamina before his limbs stopped responding, so he raised one arm and threw his arm out over and over wildly, just hoping to get one good hit of the shield into whatever this invisible shining being was.

The thing twisted out of the way just in time, but Steve felt the tip catch on something as it went into the dirt. There was a little stuttering gasp, high and feminine, and the figure finally dropped whatever camouflage it had to reveal—

“Nat?” Steve choked out, gasping.

She was looking up at him, wide-eyed, chest heaving, her hands splayed up by her head in a parody of submission and her eyes wild with fright. There was a cut on her neck where Steve’s shield had caught her, bleeding sluggishly into the dirt. “Steve. Steve, it’s me, don’t hurt me—”

Steve swung down the shield again, because it _wasn’t._ The voice wasn’t right, and neither were the mannerisms. The legs around his neck hadn’t loosened up at all and hadn’t gotten any hotter, nothing like the warmth Natasha exuded when she sat next to him on the couch or let Steve hug her. Still icy cold.

The skin of the Natasha on the ground twisted, lightning quick and grotesque, and Steve swerved to move the shield before it hit her with a choked off cry.

“Don’t hurt me, please,” Peggy gasped in that same false falsetto. The legs around his neck tightened, but he wasn’t going to—hurt her? Kill her? She was already dead, this _wasn’t her_ , yet Steve was frozen. She looked just as she did before he went into the ice. Her hair was mussed from being in the dirt and even though Steve knew Peggy wouldn’t have minded he wanted to reach out and fix it a little, get that terrified look off her face and wipe off her lipstick where it had smeared before she noticed and gave a little _tch_ of annoyance. She was even back in her old uniform, pressed and slick. The nylon of her stockings scraped against his neck as her grip got tighter even as she looked so familiar and lovely beneath him.

Steve slammed the flat of his shield across her face.

The legs around his neck released as Peggy snapped to the side, rolling from the force of the blow. The guilt was immediate and nauseating, but it wasn’t her, it wasn’t, even if she looked like Peggy and cried like her, like she was doing now, slow, steady trickles of tears that leaked down her face that she was holding with both hands, bleeding and injured. But the air that flooded his lungs assuaged any of that guilt, and he spent a moment gasping for it before slamming the edge of his shield into the golden rope and finally freeing himself from the trap.

He grabbed the Jabari spear and held it out at Peggy’s crumpled form. It would’ve been smarter to use the shield tip, kill her with one blow to the throat, but good Lord. He had seen Peggy’s body once, he wasn’t going to see it again, young and bleeding out under him. He held a finger to his ear. “We have an enhanced in the field. A shapeshifter. I don’t know if there’s more of them—” Steve began, and stopped as Peggy began to move again.

The blow to her face had broken her jaw, and Steve watched in horror as it snapped back into place. The horror only grew and he stalled with one hand by his ear and the other limply holding the spear as she got up. Now that she wasn’t under him, he could see the full transformation, her bones snapping and skin warping, changing color slightly, as she dropped a few inches, breasts compressing back into her body, becoming smaller, and harder ripples of muscle developing in her thighs, nylon turning to black combat leather as Peggy turned back into Natasha, smaller and more compact, more suited to kill.

The grin was Natasha’s too, the terrible one.

“Hello, Captain.” It wasn’t Natasha’s voice. It sounded like an overlay of Peggy and Natasha with another deeper voice, like a bad recording.

“Hello, Captain,” it said again, voice warbling into Natasha’s raspier tone.

“Hello, Captain,” it said for the third time, and sounded perfect.

“I need help in the northern sector of the jungle,” Steve whispered hoarsely into his earpiece.

Several overlapping voices answered him. “Heimdall is in the area. If you call for him—” Thor’s voice began, but Steve cut him off.

“No, he’s got the Space Stone. I don’t want him anywhere near… whatever this is.” The _whatever_ hadn’t moved, but the unsettled, horrified feeling was still stuck in his brain like taffy. When Odin had died of illness and grief on the throne of Asgard and freed Thor’s surprise maniacal sister, Heimdall had taken the Tesseract from the vault and used the Stone inside it to evacuate the refugees and later teleport them all to Earth, and he still had it, lodged in the hilt of that massive sword of his. The power of the Stone shorted out all forms of communication they tried to give him and Steve got the impression that Heimdall was pushing through the power of the Stone with sheer willpower. Steve didn’t want the guy struggling with the Infinity Stone to be as thrown off as he was and accidentally destroy half of Wakanda.

There was a moment of silence on the earpiece, aside from the constant sounds of fighting, as if Thor had heard how unnerved Steve was and was thinking. “I am on the opposite end, with Valkyrie dealing with a new squadron. I will try to help, but it won’t be for some time,” Thor finally answered, and was gone in a crackle of electricity. Shuri’s efforts to build an earpiece for Heimdall had at least produced a sturdier one for Thor and his new lightning abilities.

He still had to get to Bruce. The jungle was suspiciously quiet now, and Steve wouldn’t have ever described Bruce bumbling around in the Hulkbuster was _quiet._ Not a good sign. On the brighter side, there was no screaming, and the packs of Outriders Glaive had been seen with should’ve been making noise as well if they were still here.

There wasn’t really a brighter side to the equation, Steve finally resigned to himself. Not with this thing in front of him, wearing Natasha’s face, unmoving and still smiling.

It wasn’t attacking, which was almost the worst part. Steve didn’t like playing the waiting game, leave that to Clint and Nat, and every instinct was screaming at him to run and try to find Bruce, make sure he wasn’t hurt, but he was frozen in place. It looked just like her, and also not right. Natasha was beautiful and sometimes aloof, but she was alive. Whatever was in front of him looked terrible, face stiff and body frozen, a caricature.

Steve breathed out. A slow shift into a fighting stance put one of his shields in front of him, the spear held aloft in the other. The Natasha didn’t move.

“Steve, you said something about a shapeshifter. What’s happening?” Natasha’s voice came into his ear, breathing heavy and ragged, probably just finished with whatever monster she had been dealing with.

“It’s— it’s _you_. It’s in the northern jungle sector. Thor’s on his way,” Steve breathed.

“No, I’m on the way,” Natasha replied, her voice hard, but Steve barely heard her.

The Natasha had moved after he had spoken, just a little, a cock of the head that took a few stuttering movements to settle. Steve didn’t know what he had done to make it react, but then it shook, a full body shake like a dog after a bath, and came at him.

Even though it had gotten him into Natasha’s familiar leg-lock, it didn’t fight like her. It was just as fast as she was, sure, maybe faster, but Natasha was human through and through and relied on momentum, her legs and her whole body as opposed to Steve, who could admit he superhumanly punched his way through a lot of problems. This Natasha was like that, because she could be. Her punches held a _lot_ more weight than a human’s, even more than Steve’s. It was like fighting a steamroller.

“Bruce. Bruce, do you copy? Are you still in the jungle?” If he wasn’t, Steve had no problem scampering back to the fight. Leave whatever this thing was to guard the jungle and the back line. There was the risk of someone else running into it, but they’d get a warning out. Send Wanda after it. She was going crazy in the lab with Shuri, Steve could tell. She wanted to protect Vision, but not being on the front lines was killing her. But then there was the possibility of it turning into someone personal to her—Tony, inadvertent killer of her parents? —Pietro, dead brother? —Clint, bizarre father-figure?

Steve couldn’t just leave it here to ensnare someone else, someone who might freeze. But the idea of killing someone with Natasha’s face wasn’t a prospect he looked forward too. He didn’t want to know what it felt like to stand over her body, triumphant.

There was no answer from Bruce, regardless. If Bruce was still in the Hulkbuster, he would’ve been able to answer; the comms were built into the suit. That meant he was just wandering out there, or unconscious. Neither was a good option. Steve gritted his teeth against the thing’s onslaught as it used Natasha’s tiny hands to bend the metal of his shields.

Then, a _whoosh_ from above, and they both shot their gazes up only for Sam to stomp both his feet into the Natasha’s face.

“I’ve got you, man,” Sam said, landing and coming to a halt only a few feet from Steve, looking smug and disturbed at the same time.

The Natasha hadn’t been crushed or even thrown to the ground like any other normal human would’ve been, but it did send her stumbling backwards, bent backwards at almost a ninety-degree angle. Steve spent a second clapping Sam on the shoulder, giving him a grateful grin, before the two of them shifted to face her. Her body snapped back up and once again Steve saw her broken nose click back into place, but this time he noticed, in the better sunlight and not fighting for his life, that the blood that had started dripping out of her nose was not red, but a deep, deep blue. Its expression hadn’t changed since the second Natasha transformation, a frozen grin. The blue was staining her teeth.

“Yeah, that’s not freaky at all,” Sam muttered, bringing his wings into a more defensive stance. “Guys, I think we’ve got another Black Order member here.”

“Not possible,” Rhodes answered. “Every piece of intel left from the Chitauri tech and every one of those insane speeches Obsidian gave during the first invasion said there were only six of them. We’ve only got information on six of them. Obsidian’s dead, Maw’s in space with Tony, we’ve got Glaive and Midnight accounted for here.”

“What about the other two we haven’t seen yet? Thanos’s other girls. Could this be one of them?” Bucky’s voice was haggard and exhausted. There was the sound of machine-gun fire in the background.

Steve spared a second to glance at Sam, who shrugged slightly, not taking his eyes off of the Natasha. “Could be. No intel from Obsidian’s leftover tech that said they were shapeshifters, though. No magic or anything like Maw. One’s supposed to be made of metal, another’s just a plain old green martian.”

The amount of information Obsidian had left after the invasion had been enormous, as the guy seemed too stupid to cover any of his tracks, enough to let them know there was another threat out there. Didn’t stop them from spending the next six years squabbling about it, though. They could’ve prepared so much more, but with the Accords and Ultron… the Thanos threat hadn’t seemed so important. (Except for Tony, a tiny, nasty voice reminded him. Tony had known what was coming, and now his body was probably encased in a frozen suit, drifting through space.)

“Doesn’t matter. Whoever this is, they’re not with us,” Steve said, and hauled his shields up to charge when another voice cut in.

“Steve.” Shuri hadn’t been clocking in on the fight too much, working too heavy on the science side of things up there, trying to both pull the stone out of Vision’s head and find a way to weaponize it against the oncoming forces, so Steve stopped short when he heard her voice. “I’m seeing casualties in your area. Big ones. Whatever you’re up against, I think it’s been picking our forces off from the trees. Be careful. And _get it._ ” Her voice was hard. Those were her people dying.

“You got it, boss,” Sam said, and charged.

Steve was only a second behind him, but a second was all the thing needed. The distortion of skin, the growth, jawline snapping into something harder and hair being sucked back into its skull. “Sam, come on, we’re partners. Don’t do this,” the man said, tawny hair and pale skin, and Sam skidded to a halt so fast his own momentum almost took him down.

Steve wished he got more time to explain exactly how unnerving it was to Sam before charging in, to see the dead walking again. “You’re not Riley,” Sam said, uncertain, but Steve could suddenly _see_ what was happening now that he wasn’t embroiled in the fight himself.

Whatever the thing was, it had some magical hold on Sam. Tiny, faint glimmers of green were creeping up Sam’s body, centering around his head and eyes. It wasn’t making him see things that weren’t there, Steve could see Sam’s dead partner just as well as he could, but maybe it was _taking_ something from Sam’s mind. A memory. A person. A beloved face.

Sam was holding up one arm for his rocket shooters but not firing it, eyes still stuck on Riley’s face, still listening to Riley’s pleas that changed into a deeper and presumably more accurate pitch with each word. Something ugly and angry railed inside of Steve for a moment, those were _his memories,_ all he had left of Peggy, and whatever this thing was didn’t have any right to rummage through them like that. Sam didn’t have to attack; that was fine. Steve could get it.

Steve tackled the Riley to the ground, slamming his spear downwards to finish this thing, but it moved, serpentine, and kneed Steve in the groin. _God, Shuri, you couldn’t have added more padding there?_ Steve thought, wheezing and falling off to the side.

“Turn into whatever you want. It won't stop us forever,” Steve panted, rolling back to his feet with only a slight limp and very heroically not doubling over with his hands between his legs.

Steve didn’t think it would be good to mention that he'd probably rather die than have to kill something with Peggy's face. But it narrowed its eyes, flickering from Sam to Steve, as if cataloging that they were on the offensive now and it had to fight back, not just stand there and magic their brains.

The skin roiled again. It went from army-tan to alabaster, military uniform to hard, black armor, hair darkening to pitch black and growing and growing, braiding itself as it went. By the length of the hair, Steve honestly expected its chest and hips to swell, turning back into a more feminine form, even subtly, but the chest armor remained flat. Whatever they were looking at, Steve concluded it was probably the thing’s true form.

It was alien, that was for sure. Another one of Thanos’ children. The de facto Black Order uniform made that clear enough. It was a man, probably, even if the facial features were not exactly akin to a human. Pointed, angular bones. The eyes were too big. The lips were black, stark against skin that wasn’t white like Steve was white, but like snow, almost glistening where the sun was coming through the treetops. The hair was long and braided in one long pleat that reached to the base of his spine, where something shiny was knotted. Tiny black claws as well, coming out from almost behind the man’s fingernails. The starkest feature were the twin horns protruding from his head, not unlike the ones coming from Midnight’s face but curlier, almost in a _s_ shape. He didn’t seem to be carrying any weapons, and unlike Natasha’s horrible grin, Peggy’s lovely red mouth, or Riley’ pleading, innocent face, his expression was completely blank, devoid of all expression. Not even curiosity or the light of a fight.

“Black Order member confirmed. Looks like Thanos adopted another kid,” Sam said grimly into the transponder.

“Fantastic,” came the only dry reply, from Bucky.

There was something nagging at the back of Steve’s skull. Something odd and familiar about the angle of the man’s cheekbones, the sharp line of his nose. He shook it off. This was no time to be seeing old ghosts in alien invaders.

The man moved, cupping his hands by his sternum as he stepped forward, green light growing, and then something slammed into him from the trees.

“Wearing my _fucking face,_ ” Natasha hissed and drove her electro-static blasts into his neck.

The man arched his back, electricity sparking around his neck in a way that Steve had seen take down much bigger men, and then he _reached up_ and pried Natasha’s hands off of him. He seemed fazed, sure, but not seriously injured. Perhaps not injured at all. Natasha didn’t seem surprised, though, and rolled with it, sending the two of them tumbling into the dust.

“This is like, personal. Should we leave them to it?” Sam asked. His rockets were up and primed, but there was no way he would’ve been able to get a clean hit with the two of them grappling like that. And Natasha _did_ seem to have him, she was much more used to taking down men physically stronger than her, and every move the man made she seemed to know in advance.

“Go find Bruce!” Natasha barked, driving another blast into the man’s stomach. Steve heard it double-time, shouted at him and almost blowing his earpiece out, but nodded.

“Sam, keep people away from this area. Try to clear out the Outriders so they don’t come in. I’ll go find Bruce,” Steve said, already turning in to the jungle, and Sam gave him a cheery little salute unsuited to the situation before taking off. Sam could hold the line, no problem. All Steve had to do was drag Bruce, hopefully not just his body, out of here, maybe get Sam or Rhodes to take him to Shuri.

All they had to do was hold out until Shuri could get the Mind Stone out of Vision. The Tesseract had been used to open a hole in space, but even now that the Stone was lodged in Heimdall’s sword, it wouldn’t do any good to open up a wormhole to take them somewhere safer, not unless they could take the whole planet with them. The Mind Stone, however, Shuri could weaponize. Vision could shoot lasers out of the thing. Obsidian had used it for some kind of mind control during the invasion. The hope was to use the Mind Stone to hold off Thanos’s forces, until… until Thanos arrived. And then hopefully to hold him off with it also. All of this assuming the Mind Stone could be contained in one of Shuri’s devices (although if anyone could do it, she could), assuming that if necessary, Thor or Steve or another one of the meta-humans could wield it, and that the Mind Stone’s vague sentience wouldn’t prevent any of this from happening.

It was a lot of assumptions.

It would be also be a bitter victory if he let Bruce die before that happened, Steve thought grimly as he tore through the forest in the direction Glaive had been seen going last. There were signs of damage, wreckage through the forest that could’ve been from the Outriders, the Hulkbuster, or the Hulk himself. All Steve could do was keep heading in.

It wasn’t long before Steve came to a waterfall, or what looked like it was a waterfall at one point before something destroyed the area. Water was still pouring down from the top of the cliff, but the cliff itself was charred and crumbled in several places, the grass around it still gently smoking. In the pool at the bottom, resting up gently against the edge, was the Hulkbuster, or what remained of it.

The domed head was completely torn off, scratch marks from the Outriders shredding it littering the edges. It was missing an arm that looked as though it had been disengaged as opposed to ripped off, and Glaive’s, well, glaive, was still stuck in the armor’s pelvis, coming out the other side. Glaive and the Outriders were nowhere to be seen.

“Bruce?” Steve called out. Heart pounding, he waded through the shallow water and tried to climb up the robot’s massive bulk, sliding from the water still pounding down upon it. If he looked in the head and found Bruce’s body, he was going to lose his mind— his actual mind, they had _just_ gotten him back and he wasn’t losing any more friends to this war—

There was no one in the control center. The seat Bruce had been sitting in was gone as if it had never been there. There was just the remains of the control center and the metal floor.

 _There’s no blood,_ was all Steve could think. _Bright side._ He slid back down the armor, casting a glance toward the jungle. If Bruce was running on foot without the Hulk, he couldn’t have gotten far. Bruce was just a human. But the jungle was vast, and there was a war to fight. Steve could stay and look for him, alone and possibly injured, or go back to fighting. He raked a hand through his hair, almost braining himself with one of the shields.

Back to the war it was. There was a huge chance Steve could spend the rest of this battle until everyone was dead roaming the jungles for Bruce without finding him. His transponder had been in the dome of the Hulkbuster. He took one final glance at the remains of the armor before heading off, and paused.

The Outrider scratches weren’t just around the head, where they had torn off the top. They were focused, concentrated on the Hulkbuster’s chest, where the armor was the strongest. Deep, deep gouges, ones that would’ve taken time and stability, ones that Bruce would’ve never let them sit there and do. Steve crept back towards the armor, trying to steady his heartbeat, and climbed back on top of the armor.

It was absurd, the way Tony made these things. Before he went under the ice, he would’ve never believed anything this huge and powerful, even with Howard’s genius, could exist, but Tony had always been able to create the impossible. He knocked on the armor once, twice. No answer. Steve placed a hand directly in the center of the armor’s chest, above the desperate scratches from the Outriders, onto the still glowing arc reactor.

 _Hello, Captain Handsome,_ the Hulkbuster said in Tony’s voice, and Steve could’ve wept.

The paneling of the armor opened up, layer of armor after armor after armor, bands of metal and circuitry, keeping the sheltered form of Bruce in a metal safe room inside the armor, still strapped into the chair, safe and alive if dizzy and almost unconscious.

 _Safehouse Program completed,_ Tony’s voice said again, and the straps on the chair released so Bruce could tip directly into Steve’s arms.

“What is happening…?” Bruce mumbled. He was bleeding from a heavy gash on his throat, and his face was flickering from a chalky white to a bulging green. “They got my head. They tore my head off.”

“It’s alright. You’re fine. I got—Tony got you. He turned the armor into a safehouse,” Steve babbled, dragging him out of the pool and onto the land. He ripped off a strip of the armor from his leg, the pieces already ragged and torn from the shapeshifter’s earlier trap, and pressed it to the wound on Bruce’s neck. “Thor, I’m going to need your help now. Or Sam, Wanda. Rhodes. I’ve got Bruce here, and he’s really hurt. We need to get him to Shuri’s lab.” If the Hulk came out now, injured and scared, there was an equal chance he’d end up smashing the Wakandan soldiers. Bruce needed medical attention, but if the worst happened he also needed to be contained.

“I’m coming,” was Thor’s immediate reply.

“We’re in the same jungle. A waterfall, a cliff. No enemies in sight.”

Steve wasn’t exactly offended that Thor dropped whatever he was doing to come help Bruce and hung Steve out to dry earlier, but he was a little sore. Two of them get to go on some space adventures while he and Tony dished it out in an airplane parking lot. The whole thing seemed absurd now. Thor and Bruce got closer, forming their own team, bringing back Heimdall and Asgardian soldiers and a Valkyrie, and what? He got half a team gone or mistrustful of him. Tony and his little spider dead in space.

Steve sensed the change in atmosphere, the faint scent of ozone, seconds before Thor came into view over the treetops, heading his direction. When he landed, the ground trembled. Stormbreaker was thrown to the side as Thor bent down and batted Steve’s hands away to haul Bruce to his feet. “Hey, big guy,” Bruce said, his head lolling. “Hulk still isn’t cooperating.”

“I see that. I’m taking you to Shuri’s,” Thor said shortly.

Thor had always been—not rude, not mean. Standoffish. His help had been sorely needed when he had appeared at the beginning of Obsidian’s invasion, claiming Earth was under his protection and he had convinced his ailing father to send him here as a protector, but that didn’t mean he had settled in properly.

It had taken years to eventually get that his little brother had committed suicide less than a year before Obsidian’s invasion, apparently following some godly family secrets getting out, what Steve privately thought sounded like a complete psychotic break, and some attempted interspecies genocide. From what Thor had said, his parents had never recovered and following his mother’s murder, his father had been unable to go on and eventually died, dissipating into the universe. Steve suspected that Thor never recovered either.

Steve had tried to get Thor to take up drawing with him, trying to quell some of the disquiet inside of him, and while he had been rather good at it, large hands surprisingly careful like he was afraid of injuring the paper, it hadn’t lasted. He thought it actually might’ve been making the problem worse, as Thor seemed unable to draw anything other than his dead brother’s face over and over, papering Steve’s floor with discarded sketches of a ghost. Even if Thor hadn’t been totally comfortable being an Avenger, it was good that he had found a friend in Bruce who he actually connected with.

Thor and Bruce spent another few seconds talking quietly to one another before Bruce looped his arms around Thor’s neck, apparently preparing for takeoff. “I will get him to the lab, stabilize him, then I will be back,” Thor said, barely looking at Steve and instead calling Stormbreaker back.

“Good plan,” was all Steve could say and even then, he was cut off as Thor took off into the sky.

It was as if the bubble had burst, and suddenly he could hear the sounds from the battlefield again. He had to go check on Natasha.

He turned towards the trees, and then turned back to look at the Hulkbuster one last time. “Power down,” Steve told the armor. Didn’t need the thing exploding or an Outrider somehow taking it for a joyride.

The thin lights of the Hulkbuster’s circuitry began to fade, the inner glow of the control panels powering down. The whole thing seemed to diffuse, sparking gently in some places, bits of armor falling off in others like it had finally gotten permission to die.

 _Be safe,_ Tony’s voice warbled, the arc reactor powering the husk finally dying. _Be safe._

It was a program that had Tony's voice. In case the Hulk ever needed to be contained again, the armor had been programmed with a familiar voice in hopes of coaxing Bruce into calmness, not FRIDAY or any other AI. It wasn't real, but he was going to have to deal with that on repeat for the rest of his days: Tony telling him from beyond the grave to _be safe, be safe._

He would try, at least. Try not to die, try not to let anyone else die either. He started back into the jungle the way he came, following both his own footprints and the sound of battle. The trip seemed to go so much quicker this time, stumbling over familiar landmarks and finally being able to see the landscape through the trees.

One minute he was tearing through the trees alone, and then Natasha was in front of him, her eyes bright and determined. “I got him.We have to get out of here, I don’t think he’ll be down for long,” she said, already surveying the trees behind her, behind Steve, before tugging him with cold hands along to the line of the jungle.

Steve wanted to ask her a million probably invasive questions: Who was he, for you? Was it as horrible as it was for me? Did you—

He stopped, yanking his hand back. The pads of her fingers left circles of chill on his wrist. “How’d you do it? Your shocks weren’t working before,” he said, nodding to her wrists, where the Widow’s Bites were sparking faintly.

“They work if you tie him up with metal grappling wire first. Keeps the current going, like being tased,” she responded impatiently, going to grab his wrist again.

He deftly dodged it, taking another step back. “Show me,” he said. “We should get someone to bring him to Shuri’s lab. She’s trying to harness the Stone, maybe she can deal with his magic stuff.”

Of course, Steve heard the error as soon as it passed his lips. Saw the gleam in her eye. _Shuri in the lab who is trying to harness the Stone._

“Where’s Natasha?” he demanded, unsheathing the shields. “What did you do to her?”

“Where is the lab?” the Natasha said.

“Where is she?” Steve roared and swung for her.

“No matter. I’ll take it,” she replied, ducking and getting into his space in the span of a second. Her hand slammed up against his forehead, icy palm to his sweaty skin, and _pulled._ A thousand moments ran through Steve’s head at once, as if he was there and living them— the stairs, the elevator, the window Shuri was using to keep an eye on the fight, Vision spread out on the table, little nanotech operators crawling inside his skull, the floor of the lab, the third door on the left, Shuri herself, twin buns and orange suit, her smile when doing mad science, the way she looked making fun of Thor, nudging him and trying to get him to laugh—

The thing pulled out of his head with a horrible noise, a mix between a gasp and a yell, and tumbled backwards. Steve, dazed, stumbled too, catching himself on a low branch and heaving huge gasps, feeling open and exposed from whatever this man had done, rummaging through his head like a filing cabinet, tugging out relevant information from his synapses.

It was changing from Natasha again to the form Steve had begun to register as _him,_ the man with the long hair. The second thing Steve registered was that he looked sick, chalky and almost translucent, crumpled on the ground with a thousand-yard stare. In the shadows of the trees, no longer in the light, he looked blue. For a second, still reeling, Steve wanted to ask if he was _okay_ and took a step forward to help him _,_ and then he rose up and snapped his head around.

Steve had the absurd thought that it looked like dancing before pain erupted on the side of his face, ear to the center of his eyebrows, cutting a line deep across his cheekbones and barely missing his eye, although with the way he immediately had to close it against the gush of blood made the thing useless anyway.

The man crept backwards, with that same still expression on its face. The braid was curled over his shoulder this time, and Steve could see he’d been hit with it; more accurately, with the tiny knife the man had braided into the bottom of it. Steve gritted his teeth, wiping the blood out of his eye. The man hissed at him, still not paying complete attention but rather instinctively, revealing a row of shark-like teeth. Was there _any_ part of him that wasn’t dangerous?

“Natasha, come in. Natasha,” Steve said into the comms. Leaving her to go find Bruce, stupid. With a magic user? Stupid. “What’d you do to her?” he snarled, holding out the spear to the man again.

The man was barely paying attention to him, instead blinking rapidly, shaking his arms and legs like he was trying to throw something off. That was the second time he had done that, like he was rebooting, and Steve wasn’t going to waste his chance this time. The man was still crouched over, and Steve took him and his low center of gravity to the ground with a tackle. No killing this time, definitely not. Not until he knew where Natasha was. This thing could’ve taken her to one of the ships, hidden her somewhere, and he wasn’t getting away until he spilled exactly where she was and what she was doing. There was a cacophony of voices in his ear, some of them calling for Nat, some trying to ask him things, all of them he was ignoring in favor of trying to drill the tip of his shield into the man’s shoulder, pin him to the ground.

He shifted from Nat to Peggy to Bucky, all wicked fast and abandoned just as quick when Steve didn’t slow down his assault, trying in vain to get one hit in through the man’s both physical blocks and the way his shields bounced off something like a forcefield. He wrapped his legs around Steve’s waist and threw the two of them over, straddling Steve. He had a moment to see another tiny knife materialize in the man’s hands, seconds from plunging it into Steve’s chest before he elbowed the man across the face, throwing him off.

He recovered before he hit the ground, crouched low to the dirt on all fours, eyes slitted, head cocked. Steve was inches away from him, and the proximity to the man’s face called forth that feeling again—I _know_ him, he looks familiar—

And then the man slammed a bolt of green energy into Steve’s stomach. It felt like—an electric bolt, a shotgun blast, like it had torn a hole right through him even though the arm he immediately clamped over his body told him that wasn’t the case. Steve wheezed as the man scuttled to the side to kick the Jabari spear away, sending it rolling into the bushes, leaving just Steve and his shields.

The fact was that he was hopelessly, hilariously outmatched. Wanda should’ve been here. Thor. Maybe even Tony, with his science that bordered on magic. He could tussle with this Black Order member until the whole battlefield had been wiped out and not win. Probably die long before that. And he was tired. So tired. Steve looked up, and the defeat must’ve shown in his eyes, because the man, already readying a second blast, _grinned,_ still devoid of any actual joy but the first real expression on his dead-eyed face.

And Steve knew him.

The grin changed something about his face, made him look younger, less threatening, less alien, even with all those monster teeth. Made him leap from _familiar_ to _known._ He had seen that grin a hundred times, over and over in the face of a human-looking man, hair shorter, skin peachy, with laughing green eyes that were nothing like the ruby cat ones this man had. It was a miracle Steve had recognized him at all, he looked so different. He still had drawings of his face stashed in a nightstand, dozens of Thor’s drafts in case he ever decided to return to draw with him.

 _Oh god,_ was all Steve could think with mute horror. _Oh god._ If he managed to kill the man, there really wasn’t going to be a way to live with himself after this. There wasn’t going to be a way to live through this _period,_ because as much as Steve had no love for the Black Order, he wasn’t putting a spear or shield through Thor’s dead baby brother. Even though he had become this— this thing, nothing but a shadow of other people.

“Thor, I need you back here,” Steve whispered into his comms.

The man—Loki, Loki of Asgard— made that movement again, a jerk of his whole body like a shock. But he didn’t react otherwise. There wasn’t a hint of recognition in his face, not hatred or love, nothing from the man Thor had proclaimed so often to be equal parts kind and vicious, the best brother Thor could’ve asked for and the most terrible enemy he had ever faced. Just like a horse shaking off a fly.

 _What happened to you?_ Steve thought, still dazed even as Loki knocked him flat on his back, lips pulling back into an inhuman hiss as he swiped at Steve’s face with sharp claws. But he knew.

Steve had never seen Asgard, but he could picture it from Thor’s scathing words. A golden city built on lies. Loki, letting go and falling into the deep void of space. And Thanos, plucking him from the stars and saying _I can work with this,_ the same way he picked up all his children. There was no telling what he had done to Loki in the six years since. But again, he knew.

When Cull Obsidian’s invasion had failed, he had left behind swaths of information in laboratories he had constructed all around the globe and hidden in SHIELD’s servers after he had controlled Coulson with the Stone. Information about Thanos’s two daughters, other planets, bits about Thanos himself and the Stones, the concrete existence that there were numerous advanced civilizations of alien life, the discoveries of a century were found.

It had mainly been Tony’s job to work with the alien tech and pull out as much information as possible, collect what was necessary and pass it on to SHIELD. Tony’s primary fixation had been on the members of the Black Order, the others who could come to Earth in an effort to avenge Obsidian or continue his work, and so Steve had to sit through countless hours of ramblings and videos about Ebony Maw, one of the only members of the Order who didn’t try to get his way by direct attack. A voice that could influence thoughts and memories, make people forget what made them _them,_ combined with magic and a penchant for torture made him an insidious member of Thanos’s forces.

There had been videos on Obsidian’s archives. Steve could remember the screaming.

Tony’s particular obsession with Maw probably came from the way he seemed to be the head torturer of the Black Order. There were a lot of drunken rants about the various ways Tony would fuck him up if they ever met. From the footage pulled from the Black Order’s initial touchdown in New York, Tony had gotten that confrontation as his final wish.

Steve could imagine: Loki’s mind fractured after a suicide attempt, after falling through space, and Maw reaching around and rummaging in his brain, pulling out Asgard, pulling out all the wonderful playful traits Thor had told them Loki had, pulling out _Thor himself._ Just like Loki was doing now.

Steve got a hold of Loki’s wrist as he swiped and turned them around, trying to get Loki on his stomach where he wouldn’t be able to use those _teeth_ or _claws_ or _knives._ It was like fighting a whirlwind. Loki managed to bring his leg up and kick Steve _right across the face, shit,_ and Steve went rolling into the brush with Loki already punching back on top of him. “Loki, stop—” Steve started before Loki boxed him across the ear again. His whole face felt swollen and bruised and his right ear was ringing, his comms unit lost somewhere after that kick. “Stop it—” he started, and then just held his forearms over his face to shield himself from the continuous blows Loki rained down on him.

Somewhere along the line, with the memory of Thor pulled out his mind and into Loki’s, whatever finesse he had originally used to trap Steve and fight was gone and there was just the hailstorm of punches Loki was trying to kill him with. It was easier to predict than magic, but Steve’s face wasn’t thanking him for it. Steve dropped his defense and slammed his head into Loki’s torso, which was definitely harder than a human’s, and tackled them backwards. Loki’s head slammed back against the ground, knocking the distant look right out of his eyes. Those red eyes fixated back on him and then Loki twisted, bringing his legs around Steve’s neck again and flipping them before rolling to his feet, keeping one foot pressed right up against Steve’s neck.

The sounds from the battle outside the jungle seemed to be quieter, but Steve’s transponder had been kicked straight out of his ear and into the bushes, lost with no way for Steve to retrieve his spare from his leg pocket, and there was no way of telling from the noise who was on the winning side. Loki’s foot was on his throat, that same expressionless face looking down at him as he slowly knelt down on the other knee, the arch of his foot crushing Steve’s windpipe as he lowered himself, and pressed his palm to Steve’s forehead. Immediately the pull was back, slightly less jarring on the second time around but no less invasive, Loki’s hands squirming around in his brain. “The Space Stone. Where is it?” Loki said, pressing down harder and making the darkness creep in around Steve’s vision. There was no throwing him off; he was batting weakly at Loki’s leg with one of his shields but all of his energy was going to mentally pushing Loki out of his head—Heimdall had to stay safe, at least. If the Mind Stone hadn’t come into play yet it was unlikely to, and they needed at least one Infinity Stone on their side to stand a chance against Thanos when he arrived. He threw up memory after memory, important shards of himself in a final effort to form a mental defense: memories of Peggy, the war, the fighting, Ultron, losing Bucky to the fall and then losing him again to Hydra, the revulsion of the Accords, every bit of himself he could think of, and Loki just absorbed it unflinchingly, steamrollering his way through Steve's head in an effort to find his way to the lab.

It was dark out now. Steve had been aware of the sun setting when he cast off to find Bruce, but it seemed like the night had come on all at once. On his back, staring up through the treetops, the stars looked so bright. Wakanda dimmed at night, and they were far from the city anyway. It was so different from New York, where at night the place was lit up like a Christmas tree, and here you could count every light in the sky. One of those lights— maybe Ebony Maw’s ship, bringing Thanos here. Maybe the dying light of Tony’s arc reactor.

Tony was dead. But Loki was still here. So Steve stopped with the shields— the one he was hitting weakly against Loki’s ankle falling to the side, and the mental barricades dropping all at once.

And he thought of Thor.

A graphite pencil held gingerly in his hand, balancing a sketchbook on one knee, looking over Steve’s shoulder at the piece he was working on, eyebrows furrowed in frustration as Steve made brief sketches of the team, still life, animals, and Thor, trying to replicate him and failing. Only producing decent drawings of Loki’s face like it was the sole thing in life he could remember clearly. Brief, other moments.

Thor days ago, following Bruce around the lab like a sad puppy and making an effort to talk science with him and Shuri.

Thor years prior, hunched over a pan as Tony tried to teach him how to cook the spicy Spanish dishes his nannies had taught him growing up.

Playing games with Clint, hitting each other with console controllers over a bowl of Cheetos, sparring with Natasha, the way he tried to laugh as she playfully covered his eyes with her tiny hands even as behind him she locked her legs around his throat.

Thor crashing on Earth at the beginning of Obsidian’s invasion, clad in mourning black, and every action thereafter clouded with sorrow.

Seven years of memories, and even though it was Loki’s magic in his brain and not the other way around, a flood of foreign emotions came down the line, a well of grief from remembering something very important, _the_ most important thing. Just seven years, a decimal point in the almost endless years Thor and Loki had lived and would continue to live, but Steve knew Loki was feeling them like a whole missing lifetime. Loki’s magic eased back, and in the second before Loki vanished from his mind entirely, Steve felt the rotten hooks of Maw’s magic loosen on Loki too.

Loki stepped off his throat. Steve rolled onto his side and gasped in huge, wet breaths that burned going into his lungs.

Spots of color came back into view, blotting out the darkness that was creeping in around the edges. “It was Maw,” Loki was saying somewhere far away. “It was Maw; I didn’t remember. He made me—”

“I know,” Steve choked out. It was Bucky all over again. He’d only known Loki for what? Half an hour? It still hurt just as much as seeing Bucky come out of his brainwashed state, both of them disoriented and confused and knowing they had done terrible, terrible things. “I know.”

Loki slumped down next to him. He looked paler than he had, which was saying something, and clammy on top of that. Also a bit like he was about to throw up on Steve’s legs, which he moved out of the way.

“Natasha,” Steve heaved, rubbing his throat. “Where is she?”

“She’s fine,” Loki said, an odd timbre to his voice Steve realized after a moment was borderline hysteria. “She wouldn’t let me get close. Had a staff and guns and wasn’t trying to hit me with her _fists_ like a _moron—”_ He broke off with a wheeze, still chuckling. Although it was vastly inappropriate for the situation, Steve felt his cheeks warm. “I just—ran. Went to look for you instead. You are much simpler than her.”

“Thanks,” Steve said. He could imagine Natasha crashing through the jungle, on a rampage for the man who had stolen her face, but that was fine and Steve could explain the situation as long as she was _safe._ And he didn’t think Loki was lying. His eyes were far away and distant, not the clouded emotionless state they had been five minutes prior, but as if reliving old memories. He was probably doing exactly that, putting his memories and his entire _personhood_ back where it belonged. Steve shuddered. If someone pulled Bucky, Sam, Peggy, Natasha, out of his head, who would he be? Malleable and easy to manipulate by a deranged genocidal maniac, certainly.

Loki’s hands moved softly along the ground, stroking gently along one blade of grass as if seeing the greenery of Earth for the first time.

He still looked ill. Steve dragged himself to his feet, retracting his shields into his gauntlets, and held out a hand. Nothing left to do to Loki now. Steve was going to finish this fight, and if he didn’t die, take Loki to Thor, have that reunion, try not to think about the casualties of the battle, fail, and then maybe, finally, take a nap.

Loki looked for a second like he was about to argue just for the sake of arguing, and then looked like he was about to throw up again, then took Steve’s hand. Steve slung the arm over his shoulders and pulled Loki up. He had felt Loki’s muscles while fighting him, obviously far stronger than he looked, but he was suspiciously light and the bones of his fingers and wrist felt frail. His body was cold, and the tips of his fingers where they brushed against Steve’s neck incited goosebumps.

They limped to the edge of the trees, Steve basically dragging Loki alongside him, only to be faced with the ongoing battle, quieter now that the Outriders and the rest of the army had advanced upon Shuri’s lab and the Wakandan city, farther away from the jungle. Steve could see them in the distance, yet couldn’t see any Wakandan soldiers. He prayed they all hadn’t been killed and rather evacuated for some reason, then noticed there were _no_ troops on the field, Wakandan or Avengers or otherwise. He pulled the spare comms out and put it in his ear to ask exactly what the hell was happening, but all that was coming through were jumbled up crackling voices and background static.

“You’ll never stop him,” Loki said, licking his still-split lower lip, leaking blue down his pale face. Ignoring the way the words made his heart clench, Steve opened his mouth to try the comms again.

There was no warning when a beam of yellow energy suddenly split the air.

The oxygen seemed to sizzle on Steve’s skin and he instinctively opened and held up the shields in front of his and Loki’s face, and, barely able to withstand the bright light that speared through the sky, saw it strike the oncoming battleships. The light carved through them like butter, sending explosions throughout the night sky and parts raining down onto the landscape of Wakanda like shooting stars. Within seconds, there were no ships left at all, just hunks of broken metal beginning their descent towards Earth. Steve pulled Loki underneath a nearby overhanging tree and they huddled there as the ground shook with their impact.

Steve watched as the pieces, charred and flaming, hit the grassy fields of Wakanda, as some other members of Thanos’s army fell to their deaths with the echoes of the initial explosions still ringing in his ears. The whole thing was over in only a minute, the waves of Outriders burnt to a crisp and the massive ships nothing but metallic husks in craters on the ground.

“Son of a bitch,” Steve muttered, peering from behind his shields, which he felt was the only way to summarize the situation. When the ringing faded to nothing but the sound of distant crackling fire from the fallen ships, reality seemed to sharpen from _whatever_ had just happened and Loki’s icy cold body, pressed up against Steve from where he had covered them both with his shields, suddenly shifted.

Steve turned to face him. His mouth was hanging open slightly, pushing himself to a sitting position and brushing the hair out of his face. The braid had come undone and a river of black hair pooled on the ground next to him, the glittering knife nowhere to be seen. There were burn marks on his temples, black charring he had initially taken for alien markings, leading down to his eyes, where Steve knew from Obsidian’s information Maw attached his mind-breaking magic.

“She did it,” Loki said, voice in hollow shock. “You Midgardians have weaponized the Mind Stone.”

“What was that you were just saying about never stopping him?” Steve asked, feeling on the verge of collapsing and also of laughing.

The comms in his ear crackled. “Did anyone see that?” Shuri’s excited voice came through. “Please tell me someone saw that.”

  


It had technically been Vision who had fired off the thing in the first place, but he was rightfully placing the credit with Shuri, who was gladly taking it.

“Are you telling me she had a laser cannon _laying around_?” Rhodes was saying to T’Challa, who looked regal as always if not faintly proud. The War Machine suit was faintly smoking and missing chunks of its shoulder armor, but the legs were still intact, so Rhodes wasn’t sitting down anytime soon. “Who just has that?”

“My little sister always has projects too large and unwieldy for Wakanda to properly utilize. The real challenge was always getting the Stone out of the Vision and making sure it didn’t take on a mind of its own,” T’Challa replied serenely, as if Shuri wasn’t the scariest person Steve had ever met.

If Thanos ever made his way to Earth, and the chances were looking slimmer now that his army had been decimated by the Wakandan and Asgardian forces and the remaining Avengers, he would have a lot more to reckon with. Heimdall had used the Space Stone in his sword to send stragglers of the remaining army into orbit, and for the first time in what felt like years, there were no immediate enemies to fight. Steve kept catching himself looking out the window, scanning for Outriders, more ships, or anything else that may be coming their way. But nothing ever was.

The only remotely enemy-shaped thing that remained in Wakanda was Loki.

The reunion between Thor and Loki had been both touching and horrifying at the same time. Thor had gone still when he had seen Steve, flanked by a silent Loki, then made an abortive movement with his arms. “It’s him, Thor. Thanos had him,” Steve had said, and that had been the wrong thing to say.

Thor’s whole face had crumpled, agonized that Loki had been out there _the whole time,_ even as he lumbered forward and took Loki into his arms, eyes wide and terrified like his little brother would go up in smoke. Loki had remained motionless, only flexing his hands by his sides in Thor’s embrace.

“Brother, I—” Thor had started, and then Loki sank his teeth into Thor’s shoulder, razors slicing through the leather armor and into his skin. Blood gushed around the punctures, flooding over Thor’s armor and dripping down Loki’s throat, but still he hung on.

Every person in the room had started forward until Steve held out a hand to hold them back. Thor hadn’t even flinched even as Loki dug his teeth in harder, hands still hanging by his sides with no other show of attack, but instead just reached up and cupped the back of Loki’s head. It was unnatural, Steve thought, to see the big man’s hands shake so much.

Loki had eventually released him, mouth stained red, and pulled back from the embrace. Thor had watched him go, being led off by Wakandan soldiers, every line of his body clearly wanting to sprint after them. It was T’Challa who had eventually led him away, murmuring quiet assurances that Loki would be kept under watch but still cared for in their facilities, that Thor would be free to visit him whenever he wanted, and other comforts that did little to lessen the strain in Thor’s shoulders as they vanished down another hall.

“You good?” Bucky asked, creeping up behind him and making him jump with a hand clamped on his shoulder.

It had all happened very suddenly: bringing Loki to the Wakandan facility and Thor, explaining the situation, and now Loki was gone. Their fight seemed so far away, the dead look in Loki’s eyes a thankfully distant memory. Steve had been an afterthought in the whole process, which was fine, he wasn’t expecting or wanting congratulations or anything for handling the situation, but now he was left feeling like Loki had been taken from him and the vicious urge to run down the hallway to check up on him took him off guard.

Steve nodded. Bucky sighed. “Sure thing, pal. Let’s go debrief.”

Steve still expected Thanos to swoop in again, send in more armies, and even with Shuri’s new laser cannon the thought didn’t bring him any ease. Debrief was one large argument about Wakandan defenses, international news clamoring for information, the location of Thanos himself, Shuri’s continuing worry that the Stone was sentient, and twenty other things Steve could barely keep track of. The only thing he really wanted to do was check on Wanda and Vision, who were huddled in a corner, present for the conversation but talking amongst themselves, Wanda’s pale hands supporting him. He was obviously still exhausted from the procedure and the hole in his head was jarring.

He shook off one of the Wakandan scientists trying to ask him questions about the Hulk’s anatomy, like _that_ was something he knew anything about, and turned towards the couple, only to veer away at the last second when Rhodes’s plaintive voice came into earshot, asking everyone around the table for any news about Tony.

He excused himself politely. The wondrous thing about being in Wakanda, he thought guilty, was that he wasn’t in charge of things any longer. Everyone turned to T’Challa first and foremost, and as terrible as it was to dump responsibility on the new king, it was a burden off his shoulders. Unsurprisingly, Sam and Bucky followed him, flanking him like wolves. They could probably both sense the anxiety coming off of him in waves, and was pathetically grateful for their presence.

“Sorry, it was just—” He waved a hand.

“Yeah, we know,” Bucky replied darkly. “Think you’ve done enough for now. Leave them to it.”

“So, can we add ‘breaking villainous brainwashing with the power of love’ to your superhuman powers now?” Sam deadpanned as they walked. Behind him, Bucky gave a cough that sounded suspiciously like a chuckle. “What? This isn’t just about you anymore. Someone’s brainwashed, they look into his eyes, boom. New ally.”

Steve let himself smile a little and sunk into the familiar sound of the two of them to bickering, becoming aware his footsteps were taking him further into the facility where the prisoners were kept. Bucky and Sam, even though he was sure knew where he was going, just kept up the light conversations, bumping their shoulders with his.

Thor’s hair was illuminated in the cold glow of the vibranium lighting down here. He was standing in front of the one-way mirror and looking into Loki’s official little bedroom. It effectively doubled as a cell, which Steve would have argued against if he thought Loki would care about it. The place had a bed, a desk, and in a show of homeliness, a large bookshelf, but Loki was sitting opposite the one-way mirror on the floor, seemingly looking directly at Thor. It wasn’t a bad little room given the approximately five minute notice, and there was an obvious effort to make it not a cell in a way that didn't surprise Steve. T'Challa knew a thing or two about wayward family members. But Loki barely seemed aware of his surroundings. He still hadn’t changed back to his Asgardian form.

Steve didn’t know what to say to Thor, rarely did, but he felt like in this particular scenario _something_ had to be said. Wildly, he thought about punching him on the shoulder in a friendly bro way, just to break the ice, but instead Thor’s massive hand came down on his shoulder. Steve glanced away from Loki to Thor’s face, which hadn’t changed expression.

“I don’t think I can thank you for what you’ve done here today,” Thor began. His voice was thick. “There are not words to express what it is like to have my brother back.”

Steve put his hand on the glass. “Thor, you don’t have to thank me. I don’t know— Loki might not be the brother you remember, you know?” God, he was bad at this.

Thor shook his head. “It doesn’t matter if he isn’t the Loki I knew. He is Loki. That’s all that matters.” He paused. “How did you… Maw’s magics are strong. How did you break the hold?”

Steve was pretty sure the hold wasn’t entirely broken, just fractured, letting bits of Loki back into his head, but he didn’t say anything. “I thought about you. He acted strange whenever I mentioned you, and you were always talking about how important Loki was to you, so I thought— you know. You might be just as important to him. That it would shake him out of it.”

When Steve looked over, Thor looked both as happy and tearful as Steve had ever seen him.

In his cell, Loki had finally risen from his vigil on the floor and had begun investigating the room. The sheets were peeled back, drawers were opened, and the lights were turned on and off, and he scuttled under the bed like he was looking for surveillance. He was probably being surveilled, true, but Shuri was too smart to let any of her tech be discovered. Finally, he landed on the bookshelf and instead of throwing all the books off the shelf like Steve was half-expecting, paused there, letting his hands gently run over the books. Thor squeezed his shoulder.

“I know he’s in there. Loki’s mind has always been his strongest asset. No one could erase him entirely,” he said.

“Not even Maw?” Steve asked.

“No one,” Thor repeated, and Steve hoped it was true.

  


Thor was right, as it turned out. Loki had put up barrier after barrier, some magic, some mental, not enough to completely block out Maw’s torture and programming but enough to keep some part of him alive in there. Wakanda was also possibly the best place for Loki to be; it had barely been any time at all since Bucky had been deprogrammed and Shuri had basically perfected the process. Shuri’s initial algorithm that had been used to deprogram Bucky’s triggers had been reprogrammed to Loki’s and he reported almost every day for tweaks to the program.

“This is the second white boy you’ve brought to me,” Shuri had chirped while Loki had been under, zipping around the lab and nudging him playfully. “Is this going to be your _thing_ now?”

 _I hope not,_ Steve thought wearily, looking at Loki’s sleeping form as Shuri’s machines whirred away around him.

After that, regular therapy that Loki was forced into attending improved his mood by increments. Steve wasn’t sure how much Thor spending time with his face pressed up against the glass of Loki’s room helped, but Loki was definitely doing _considerably_ better. He wasn’t snapping at anyone who came within a foot of him and agreed to relinquish a frankly comical number of knives he had hidden, although Steve wasn’t fooled into thinking he had given up all of them. Loki wasn’t openly hostile, but still wary and recalcitrant, and Steve, having touched minds with him, had an odd sort of ache in his chest to go in and just see him face-to-face without that panel of glass between him, see if he was really okay.

Which is what brought him to Loki’s door, over a month after Thanos’s final invasion and without any further signs of a future attack. If he was going to officially visit, he knew he should’ve done it a long time ago instead of doing his best Thor impersonation and staring at Loki wistfully through the glass whenever he got the chance. Now, it was just weird.

He had tried to express this to Bucky earlier, who had been less than sympathetic. “Just go see him, for fuck’s sake. I can’t sit here and listen to you stress yourself out,” he had said, and that had been the end of it.

The doors slid open soundlessly after a brief scan of Steve’s handprint. No turning back now. Loki was hunched over on the bed, pouring over one of the books from the shelf Steve had seen him read several times before. His back was to Steve, but the second he entered the room he read Loki’s awareness of him in the sudden tensing of his back, the pause in turning the pages.

Loki turned. His Asgardian glamour wasn’t on today; although he occasionally shifted into it, the alien form seemed here to stay. It unfortunately attracted the interest of a few scientists, who had been succinctly driven away after Loki had hissed at them and made to bite their fingers off, but for now it did seem like the form he was most settled in. Loki’s eyes were calm and impassive, clearly not impressed with the man before him.

“My name is Steve Rogers. Captain America,” he added lamely. “I just—” Felt responsible for you? Am concerned about you? Thought we should talk after you hacked into my brain?

“I know who you are,” Loki replied. His eyes were narrowed into slits, annoyed at being disturbed if anything.

“I just thought I’d check in on you, see if you needed anything,” he decided on, settling on crossing his arms and taking Thor’s advice not to rise to any barbs slung his way.

“A room with privacy. My beleaguered brute of a brother not watching me for hours outside the glass. An audience with your tiny lady scientist, so I may know how she crafted a weapon to hold a Stone and finally get some decent conversation,” Loki snapped, closing his book and beginning to pace the room.

T’Challa had been trying to keep Shuri away from Loki aside from reprogramming sessions, actually, as the idea of the two of them working together on something was frankly terrifying. Shuri would weasel her way in here before long and the two of them could talk science and magic all day. Steve cleared his throat and shook off that scenario. “I’ll, uh, talk to Thor about the lurking. Do you want to talk to him?” Steve asked. Loki didn’t answer.

Steve wanted to tell him that Thor had been dead inside for six years, that after he had blown up Asgard with his sister, he was alone in the universe and all of the drawings of Loki’s face were painstakingly etched with care. That Thor missed him, and loved him, and despite whatever had happened all those years ago during Thor’s initial banishment, Thor wanted him back.

“If you need anything, just let me know. I’ve had Shuri put my number into your pad. So you can text me. I’m not too great at it, but I can’t imagine you are either. But I’ll answer,” Steve continued. Loki wasn’t ready for all of that. Thor probably wasn’t either.

He turned to go, punching in the code he was sure Loki already knew on the keypad, the doors sliding open moments later.

“Steve,” Loki said from behind him.

He turned. It was oddly informal, but Steve supposed after rummaging through his head Loki didn’t feel like they were strangers. That was weird; Steve knew little to nothing about the man in front of him, and Loki probably knew everything about him. Loki had stopped his pacing and was standing ramrod straight in the center of the room, posture stiff and guarded.

“Thank you,” he said haltingly. “I doubt many of your allies would have foolishly put themselves in danger in an effort to save an enemy.”

Regardless of the insult, Steve smiled. “Any day, Loki,” he replied and nodded to the electronic pad Loki had in its case on his desk. Shuri had it specially made to respond to his icy touch instead of human warmth, and Loki had surprised everyone by guarding it viciously. Steve thought it was probably because it was his only possession, made just for him. “Remember to text.”

Letting his stiff posture fall away, Loki slunk over to his desk to pick up the pad and flip back the case, turning his back on Steve with a small affirmative noise and waving him off with the other hand. He figured that was all he was going to get out of Loki today and made for the open doors, which slid shut behind him with a kind of finality. Loki didn’t even glance up.

Through the glass, Steve could see Loki thumbing his way through Steve’s file before finally coming to rest on the _Contact_ page, brushing the tips of his fingers over the phone number. In the abject curiosity and wonder on his face, Steve could see Thor’s little brother before the fall, something friendly in the crinkles around his eyes.

Several floors above, there were a thousand different tasks to do, press to cover, plans to make. Helping Shuri memorialize the soldiers that fought in the battle, figuring out what was wrong with Bruce and the Hulk, pulling Rhodes away from flying around the Wakandan airspace, forever on the lookout for a man in a metal suit, but Loki was here, impish wonder alight in the small smile on his face. Not all was lost.

This wasn’t going to be like Tony, he told himself as he walked down the hall to the stairwell leading back to the main facility. He wasn’t going to wait this time for a phone call. He didn’t give Loki his number so it could go bitterly ignored like the burner phone he had pressed into an envelope, never used. He could ask Shuri for a direct line to Loki’s pad, text him, maybe call, try to mend whatever broken fences lay waste in his and Thor’s relationship if Loki let him get that close. Maybe just talk.

And there was so much to talk about. He wanted to know about the history of art that Loki had lived through, if they read the same kind of books. He wanted to introduce Loki to Bucky; Sam’s jokes be damned, the two of them had a lot of in common and Steve thought they’d be a terrifying riot together. He wanted to run his fingers along the little raised markings on Loki’s chalky skin. Part of it, Steve knew, was the fact that Loki had been in his head and knew everything about him and he knew nothing about Loki save his name and shreds of a bleak past. It was natural to want to even the odds a little. Maybe if he was saner he’d want to punch Loki for getting in his head, and instead he thought about the idea that Loki was the only person in the whole universe who knew what Steve had been through. Becoming friends with Loki was an insane endeavor. Absurd. Steve couldn’t wait.

Steve’s phone buzzed as he reached the top of the stairs, deep golden light peering in from the Wakandan sunset and nearly blinding him. He pulled it out and smiled.

**Author's Note:**

> and then without the space stone, thanos is defeated by tony & co, who then meet up with the guardians, and everyone gets to earth and lives happily ever after. don't talk to me; I'm not ready for endgame.
> 
> come join me on [tumblr](https://valkyrisms.tumblr.com/) if you're there.


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